Countdown to Collider

On Monday 9 January 2012 I arrived at the Science Museum for my first day in gainful employment. My student days were over - I'd handed in my PhD dissertation three months earlier, moved to a flat in south London and was now the first "Science Museum Fellow of Modern Science" - clearly an important post, if only because the title contains "science" not once, but twice.

The job is a strange mixture of research physicist and curator. For the first half of the week I formed half the content team scoping a project known as "the LHC exhibition"; a potential show all about CERN's Large Hadron Collider. For the second half of the week I was back at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, starting my new life as a fully fledged PostDoc on the LHCb experiment.

Twenty one months, and a lot of train journeys later, "LHC" has been reborn as Collider: step inside the world'sgreatest experiment. Meanwhile the real LHC has switched off for its long shutdown, after a year of running that saw the Higgs boson cornered and a huge quantity of precious data recorded - so much, in fact, that we are still busily analysing it now.

My job has evolved too. I arrived at the Science Museum as something of an unknown quantity and I suspect my colleagues were unsure what could usefully be done with a particle physicist with no museum experience.  After a few months, I guess I must have shown that I could be of some use, as I was made "Head of Content", equivalent to exhibition curator.

Being involved in the development of an exhibition from the beginning has been a hugely rewarding experience. I've met and worked with an incredible range of talented people, from exhibition designers, curators, historians, graphic artists, animators, film makers, sound artists and writers to the engineers in charge of the LHC, world-class physicists who planned and built the gigantic CERN experiments and even (briefly) Peter Higgs.

As for research, though it certainly isn't easy, I've found it is possible to get stuff done on three (and even two) days a week. Though I admit to a lingering feeling of guilt at not being able to engage to the same degree as my full-time colleagues, I've still managed to produce published research along with a very patient PhD student. I've also been blessed with a very supportive boss, who has shown great patience when I've disappeared for exhibition meetings at design studios in east London.

Now there are just two months to go until Collider opens its doors to the public. Until last week it was still an exhibition on paper only, but two things happened on Thursday to make it suddenly real. First a lorry-load of objects from CERN arrived at the Science Museum. The conservation lab is now packed with superconducting magnets, accelerating cavities, particle detectors and even a block of crystal. Opening a box to see the massive two-tonne LHC magnet that will be the star of the exhibition, up until that point just a line on a spreadsheet, was pretty exciting.

The other thing was standing in the empty gallery, looking at the blank canvas that will become Collider. I can't wait to see what people make of it.